Hal Crowther

Shame is for Sissies

We're living through a time when Americans are challenged to
comprehend and assimilate things we've never encountered before,
things with no clear precedent in our public lives. Some of the most
bewildering are provided by our elected leaders, at the highest level
of power and responsibility.

If you saw Gerald Herbert's AP photo of President Bush strolling
hand in hand with Crown Prince Abdullah of Saudi Arabia, like a pair
of giddy schoolgirls lost in puppy love, what floored you was not the
gesture, which the New York Times initially captioned "a traditional
sign of friendship" (Saudi, not Texan) and White House aides later
attributed to Bush's solicitous concern for the aging prince's
balance on a rough gravel pathway. What astonished you was that this
touching spectacle unfolded in full view of working wire service
photographers, and that the formidable White House spin machine made
no apparent effort to keep the image out of circulation.

We stared in disbelief. The president's state-of-the-art image
factory, which manipulates and micro-manages every atomic particle of
information that might influence the public's opinion of Mr. Bush --
and pressures and persecutes every journalist whose opinion is
unsatisfactory -- had no problem with a photograph that carried a
20-megaton payload of scalding irony. Here was the leader of the
nation that produced Osama bin Laden and the suicide Saudis, who laid
waste to the Pentagon and brought down the World Trade towers on
9/11/01; the prince who exercises more control than any other man
living over soaring oil prices that hobble the American economy; the
head of a harsh anti-democratic monarchy, a royal family linked
intimately to the Bush family (like the bin Ladens) by a dozen
embarrassing books. Here he was, just Uncle Abdullah, holding hands
with the president of the United States and whispering sweet nothings
about petroleum, the thing they both know and love the best.

Oil in the family. Enough nutritious irony in a single frame to
feed every comic and talk show host to the left of Fox News to
sustain their tribe all summer long. Counting himself among the
stunned was the fundamentalist Republican Gary Bauer.

"You wonder," Bauer told Time's Joe Klein, "if the folks at the
White House have any idea of the impact an image like this has out in
Middle America."

You wonder. And you wonder, if "the folks at the White House"
command infinitely less irony than Gary Bauer, just where their
consciousness could possibly intersect with your own, or with that of
anyone you know. Has the US been hijacked by aliens?

Irony, inseparable from humor and from humility, is the most
reliable litmus test for human intelligence. Art, literature, history
and even philosophy become crude and mechanical in its absence;
personality loses its charm, hypocrisy proliferates unimpeded. And
this is the conundrum the Bush White House presents and has always
presented. Can they possibly be so stupid, or are we dealing with
something even more alarming than stupidity, an obliviousness born of
cynicism, native arrogance and the toxicity of power? Can it be a
pose, this refusal to acknowledge any irony that weighs against them,
no matter how immense?

One theory is that we are suffering the revenge of remedial
readers. There was sneering when ill-wishers outed George W. Bush and
Dick Cheney as academic trainwrecks and displayed their wretched
transcripts on op-ed pages. I didn't sneer too much. Valedictorians
are a negligible minority, and intellectual credentials seem to be a
liability for American politicians. (Another pyrotechnic irony,
though -- if you polled the entire Yale class of '68, how many would
express "uncertainty" about evolution? My guess is just one -- the
President of the United States.)

Obviously there's a kind of feral cunning that trumps abstract
intelligence on the political battlefield. But Bush's nomination of
John Bolton for ambassador to the United Nations, no less than the
uncensored prom photo with Prince Abdullah, chills us because neither
intelligence nor cunning can account for it. Something darker is at
work.

Bolton is simply the Republican fist with its middle finger held
erect, a calculated insult aimed at Democrats, the media and the
world -- a rude gesture of unprecedented arrogance and defiance. Is
this a coarse joke, irony served White House-style? For America's
most visible and sensitive diplomatic post, they offer the ultimate
anti-diplomat, an obnoxious bully so incapable of diplomacy or common
tact that he offends everyone he encounters, Democrat or Republican,
ally or enemy.

"It is totally erroneous to speak of Bolton as a diplomat," said
retired diplomat Frederick Vreeland, who worked with Bolton under
President George H.W. Bush. "He spoke of the UN as being the
enemy."

I have some background on Bolton that isn't generally available, a
report from a friend of mine (nameless unless someone doubts him) who
was Bolton's classmate in military school.

"Short, nonathletic, arrogant, unpopular and highly intolerant of
other people's opinions," Bolton's classmate recalls, "sort of
Napoleonic but without any of Napoleon's talents for leadership.
Making him ambassador is like thumbing our nose at the UN, and
foreign diplomats understand that."

Here is the developmental profile of a classic jerk, if we reject
a popular anatomical epithet that describes him even more accurately.
Already hopeless in the 7th grade, praised by no one save Jesse Helms
-- and an apostle of Helms's foreign policy, in essence "Kiss the
eagle's bloody talons" -- John Bolton may soon be the angry face that
America presents to the world. His description by a conservative
Republican as "a kiss-up, kick-down sort of guy," "a serial abuser of
little people," closes the case on Bolton's character. We've all met
this miserable little prick somewhere, in some avatar, and we all
regret it.

If this nomination isn't about humor, if it isn't official
malfunction at the level of brain damage, where do we file it? Does
the White House relish the grim irony of Bolton at the UN, or miss it
entirely? Which is worse? We all know the ways of bullies, the way
humorlessness and power seem to seek each other out. For epic
humorlessness, few bullies eclipse Kim Jong Il, the dictator of North
Korea, whose government (according to Molly Ivins) sampled the
diplomacy of John Bolton and denounced him as "human scum" and "a
bloodsucker." Bullies and dictators seldom get the joke, and deal
simply with irony -- when you don't get the joke, you smash the
joker.

The Kim Jong Il factor, the fascist factor, is what we need to
fear most when our president displays serene indifference to irony,
to criticism, to reality. This is something new in America, this body
language of unrestrained power and executive fiat. To the best of my
knowledge, the barely-elected (many now say never-elected) Republican
junta has no permanent, North Korean-style lock on the government of
the USA -- but they act as if they do.

What do they know that we don't know? Our leaders will always try
to manipulate and mislead us. But in a democracy, politicians court
us, right, and charm us if they can? The president is obliged to
notice, and care, when we laugh at him. Yet irony, according to the
John Boltons and Kim Jong Ils of this belligerent planet, is a thing
victims and losers apply to ease the sting of their wounds. How many
divisions do ironists command? What happens to your sense of humor
when I make your nose bleed?

Pathology lurks. Somehow the whole country -- the whole world --
has begun to pay dearly for the fact that Bolton, Bush and Cheney
were never the best or the brightest or the most beloved. The late
Hunter Thompson was no unimpeachable news source, but he got my
attention when he described George W. Bush as "a baffled little
creep" who used to adhere to the fringes of the fast Houston cocaine
crowd -- and once passed out in Thompson's bathtub.

"He was nothing, he offered nothing, and he promised nothing,"
Thompson recalled. "He was insignificant in every way. He had no
humor." (My italics.)

From harsh experience, I've come to believe that personality
shapes history -- that whatever shaped Alexander, Muhammad, Saladin,
Luther, Robespierre, Napoleon, Hitler and Stalin made the world we
live in, to a far greater extent than class struggles, market forces
or the clash of huge ideas. Freud, for all his myopia, was closer to
the truth than Marx. History is like a trail of gunpowder waiting for
personality to strike a spark. The conditions Marx studied only
determine the type of personality most likely to ignite events.

It's their turn now -- unblushing self-promoters, purveyors of
empty bravado, goat-brained thugs in Armani suits -- all of irony's
natural victims striking back at their tormentors. The smell of
curdled testosterone hangs over Washington, D.C., like a chemical
smog. The new ruling class takes its motto from one of its charter
members, Edward von Kloberg III, the outrageous gay lobbyist who
committed suicide in Rome last week, ending a career devoted to
representing outlaw dictators and genocidal tyrants. He sold his
services to Saddam Hussein, Nicolae Ceausescu and Samuel K. Doe of
Liberia, and admitted to courting Kim Jong Il and Paraguay's heinous
Alfredo Stroessner. Asked how he squared his clients with his
conscience, von Kloberg replied, "Shame is for sissies."

How long, in Karl Rove's America, before "Shame is for sissies"
replaces "E pluribus unum" on the coin of the realm? When the
impudence and impenitence of George Bush or Tom DeLay leaves you
speechless, remember their mentor von Kloberg, a man who would have
gleefully handled public relations for Satan himself. Yet von Kloberg
had one virtue his disciples lack: He was no hypocrite. He never once
said he was defending traditional family values or making the world
safe for democracy. There's even evidence that he was capable of
irony.

Von Kloberg has gone to his reward, perhaps to join some of the
gruesome clients he liked to call "the damned." But his dark art
lives after him, in a city and most dramatically in an administration
that approaches every problem as an image problem. Murder, genocide,
torture, graft, corruption? The dictator's spin doctor has better
words -- "negative projection," perhaps, or "poor communication."
Indefensible, catastrophic invasion of an unoffending country? Call
it Operation Iraqi Freedom, call it a jihad for democracy. You don't
have to be subtle, as the White House constantly reminds us. You
don't have to reckon with irony, that last refuge of the effete. Just
change the words, repeat them incessantly, and disparage anyone who
resists them. Incompetent, arrogant and inflexible, the Bush
administration House has scored its greatest successes changing the
words America uses, and reorganizing its flow of information.

Totalitarian thinkers, Hannah Arendt once wrote, are characterized
by "extreme contempt for facts as such, for in their opinion fact
depends entirely on the power of the man who can fabricate it." If
you told me 20 years ago that a cocky free press, still flaunting
Richard Nixon's scalp, could be reduced to groveling impotence by the
likes of George W. Bush, I guess I'd have laughed at you. But the
other night I saw some film of Syrian troop carriers leaving Lebanon,
and the voice-over -- this was CNN, I swear -- said something like,
"another triumph for the president's master plan to liberate the
Middle East."

It startled me like a slap in the face. When did Karl Rove plant
his microchips in their brains? The Goebbels Network is
ever-expanding. A clamorous Right defeated the press by maneuvering
it into a format where it couldn't function, a game it could never
win. The adversary model, the snarling, shouting pro-wrestling model
favored by TV "news" programmers, gives the impression that the
press, like Congress, is divided into loyal Democrats and
Republicans, liberals and conservatives. Nothing could be further
from the truth.

Journalists -- journalists by true vocation as opposed to some who
list that occupation on IRS returns -- are largely immune to
ideology, rhetoric and partisan politics. We have no heroes among
politicians; we've seen too many clowns and thieves on both sides of
the aisle. We don't vilify the president because we disagree with his
philosophy; he has no philosophy. We oppose him because we're
conditioned to hate liars, hypocrites, bullies and "serial abusers of
little people," and he's assembled the most frightening collection
we've ever seen.

By branding all unfriendly journalists (and other Americans who
criticize the president) "liberals" -- embittered members of a losing
team -- Karl Rove and company have ingeniously compromised fair
comment and legitimate dissent. A neighbor recommended something I
wrote to a friend of his, a libertarian, who read it and dismissed it
as "knee-jerk liberal." There was no trace of a liberal attitude or
left-of-center opinion in my essay. It was a conservative defense of
the First Amendment, protesting the Bush administration's war on
journalists. That libertarian has been had, like our credulous local
columnist -- attempting even-handedness -- who equated the freaky
neo-fascist entertainer Ann Coulter with the journalist Frank
Rich.

In fact, some of the most articulate criticism of the White House
has come from conservatives.

"Bush has behaved like a caricature of what a right-wing president
is supposed to be, and his continuation as president will discredit
any sort of conservatism for generations," argued American
Conservative magazine, endorsing John Kerry. "The launching of an
invasion against a country that posed no threat to the US, the doling
out of war profits to politically favored corporations, the financing
of the war by ballooning the deficit to be passed on to the nation's
children ... It is as if Bush sought to resurrect every false
1960s-era left-wing cliché about predatory imperialism and
turn it into administration policy."

It's my impression that the White House has no patience with
principles, liberal or conservative, and no respect for people who
cling to them. Principle, like shame or irony, is for sissies. Aside
from a primitive, invertebrate tropism toward power, I detect no
guiding principle in the Bush presidency except the first one young
George learned in Texas -- that oil is good and more oil is
better.

If the media still hunted with live ammunition, Enron, Halliburton
and the energy industry's pornographic profits since 9/11 would be
enough to force this oil-soaked, sheik-beholden government to resign.
(In disgrace -- remember disgrace?) The first thing every reporter
was taught, back when reporters were taught things, is that the best
way to find the truth is to follow the money. A student of the Bush
presidency watches the money flow relentlessly uphill. Americans who
earn over $200,000 a year received 97% of Bush's $1.4 trillion tax
cuts, while the money to pay for his hemorrhaging abomination of a
war was squeezed from cuts in food stamps, school lunches, student
loans and veterans' benefits. Look it up. When shame and irony leave
the hall together, no obscenity is inconceivable.

Worse still than handouts to the wealthy is the reprehensible new
legislation that blocks working Americans from climbing the hill
where the money flows -- laws like boulders rolled downhill to crush
the scrambling underclass, the estimated 80 million Americans unable
to pay their bills. Think about what it means to limit personal
bankruptcies, inhibit class action suits against toxic employers like
Wal-Mart, protect chemical polluters (usually oil companies) from
liability lawsuits and cap settlements in personal injury cases. It
means trying to eliminate what little protection ordinary citizens
retain against corporate leviathans that cheat, exploit, injure and
poison them, trap them in hopeless jobs, renege on their health care
and default on their pensions. It means stripping leverage from the
people who have no leverage to spare.

The Bush administration's domestic policies are the blueprint for
a new feudalism, a kind of fascist plutocracy. List all the
democratic safeguards that separate a working American from a slave
or a medieval serf. There are many. Labor unions? Their membership
has been reduced by two-thirds since the 1950s, and the White House
has them ticketed for extinction. Lawyers? In rightwing rhetoric,
plaintiff's attorneys like John Edwards are the devil's spawn.
Courts, judges? The radical Right rains fire on responsible judges
who resist its excesses and labors to replace them with pro-business
reactionaries. Congress? Don't play irony with me. The media? I rest
my case. If Bush has his way, the poor man, like serfs and slaves of
yore, will have no one but God to protect him. And the religious
right says God's a Republican.

While the president chides the Russians about democracy and free
speech, he schemes to reward his corporate sponsors with a lucrative
new version of slavery. If this, in fact, was a class war, it's
almost over, and the losers are being led off in chains. This is more
serious than encouraging Fred Flintstone biology while the world laps
the US in science education; more serious even than gang-raping the
environment and fighting bloody unwinnable wars, launched by lies,
that enrich your relatives and cronies. This is selling out America,
suffocating its every dream and promise.

What God would confer his blessing on a punitive cult of
"Christians" -- and no few Jews -- who answer only to the powerful
and literally, not figuratively, rob the poorbox to pay for their
wars? Are you listening to the anguish of a liberal?

It's funny. If the government were magically seized by that
micro-minority of PC radicals who attack free speech from the left
and don't merely support but obey organized victim groups, I would
be, as I've always been, among their harshest critics. I'm of an age
and a turn of mind to return, with a few reservations, to the
politics of my boyhood idol Barry Goldwater. Instead, the shameless
bastards in Washington are turning me into the Che Guevara of
AARP.

What's a radical, under the new corporate totalitarianism? If you
wonder sometimes whether everyone in your family is human, play them
Bruce Springsteen's The Ghost of Tom Joad, a collection of songs that
challenge you to care about Americans with no power, few breaks and
few options. If one of your tribe mutters something about
"bleeding-heart liberals," well, he has no heart -- but he has a
great chance to get ahead in the cannibal society George W. Bush and
John Bolton represent.

Hal Crowther's most recent book is Cathedrals of Kudzu; a new
collection of essays, Gather at the River, will be published in
August by LSU Press.